8 Steps to Creating the Perfect Content Marketing Strategy

So you have decided to get serious about content marketing and I am sure you have lots of awesome contents you want to publish about your business right?
Now before you jump into creating those awesome content, let me enlighten you a little.
It is true that content marketing is king. It is the marketing technique that starts the process of every marketing strategy and for it to be more effective you need to put your content strategy in order.

What is a content strategy?

While content marketing focuses on the editing, creation, curation, and promotion of your product and services using the various type of content - Content strategy or content marketing strategy refers to vision and aim of why the content is being created, managed and promoted. It focuses on the wants of the customer and how you can use your content to gain their trust and finally convince them to take an action, like buy your goods patronizing your services or even subscribing to your blog.

Why do we need a strategy before creating a content?

Creating a strategy for content such as articles, blog post, graphics, and others sound funny as you already think you have awesome ideas for content topics you feel your audience will resonate with. Yes, I was like that also when I started. The thing is digital marketing as evolved. Customers are now in the center of every marketing decision. They are the ones who dictate what the manufacturer's manufacture and the products the retailers sell.

The marketing system revolves around the consumer and if you don't understand the way they think and what kind of words work on them, you will end up creating content you think is awesome but has no effect on them. Content marketing is about building trust and loyalty with your audience, customers, and leads.

A good content strategist is someone who creatively suggests ways by which trust relationship can be built between a customer and his company's products and services.

Now that you know what content strategy is and why you need it, let look at how we can create a good marketing plan or strategy.

How to Plan your Content Marketing

Set your goals: Before you start creating that content, know why you want to create it. What do you hope to achieve with the content? Are you creating it to drive more sales or increase traffic or convince your customers to make a donation or your audience to watch a video you have posted? Let your goals be the first guiding factor as you plan on creating that content.

Know your audience: who is the content meant for? Teenagers, adults, kids, old people, men, women, boys, girls? What kind of content does your audience prefer, videos, gifs, infographics, articles, graphics, e.t.c? What triggers them to take an action? These are several questions you need to ask yourself about your audience before deciding to write that content.

Know where you customers are: lots of digital marketers make this mistake. They believe that because a particular social media platform has a huge influx of users, they expect their customers will be there. There are many social media platform out there and truth be told each one of them has their business niche. There are products that can be sold well on twitter but will never work on Facebook. Same with Instagram Pinterest and Tumblr. So find where your customer hangs out the most and engage them there.

Decide what type of content you will create: Remember in point 2, we talk about knowing what kind of content resonate with your audience or customers. Point 3 also affect this decision. You need to know what kind of content works with your client. Use your competitors to solve the solution quickly by spying on them. Decide if you will be creating a video or, micro site, podcast, articles e.t.c.

Create the content: After dealing with the four points above. It now time for you to create that exciting content.

After the content creation comes the awareness part: after you have created the content, the next step is to distribute it and let people know about it. So you distribute it to the relevant platform, especially where your audience hangs out the most.

Engage your customers so they can interact with the content. Use email marketing, to remind them that you have posted a new article and they should view it.

And finally, decide on how you will effectively measure your content marketing once it has been published and pushed out. Find out your key performance indicators and how effective your campaign is going.